IQNA

TEHRAN (IQNA) – The UN special rapporteur on Myanmar has expressed concern that the Southeast Asian country may be seeking to "expel" all members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim community from its territory.

Addressing the UN
Human Rights Council in the Swiss city of Geneva on Monday, Yanghee Lee warned
that a full purge could be the ultimate goal of the institutional persecution
and horrific violence being perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslims.

Lee, who visited
Myanmar twice in the past year, said that the country was still making
Rohingyas' lives difficult by conducting a household survey and dismantling homes
in the troubled Rakhine State, Press TV reported.

"Conducting
a household survey - where those absent may be struck off the list that could
be the only legal proof of their status in Myanmar - indicates the government
may be trying to expel the Rohingya population from the country altogether. I
sincerely hope that that is not the case."

A four-month
crackdown on the minority group has seen some 75,000 Rohingya Muslims flee to
neighboring Bangladesh, where Lee said she had heard "harrowing account
after harrowing account."

"I heard
allegation after allegation of horrific events like these – slitting of
throats, indiscriminate shootings, setting alight houses with people tied up
inside and throwing very young children into the fire, as well as gang rapes
and other sexual violence,” she said.

Elsewhere in her
remarks, Lee also pushed for a high-level inquiry into abuses against the
Muslim minority community.

The UN human
rights chief, Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein, has said treatment of the Rohingya merits
a UN commission of inquiry and review by the International Criminal Court
(ICC).

Rakhine has been
under a military siege since October 2016 over a raid on a police post that was
blamed on the Rohingya.

The violence
against the Rohingya is a blow to efforts by Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San
Suu Kyi to reach a comprehensive peace agreement with the country’s ethnic
minorities.​